


now we are going to have a new noise

by bioluminesce



Series: Control Short Fics [3]
Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble Collection, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27155125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: The Oldest House wants, and sometimes Jesse Faden can tell what she and Polaris want apart from its distant, strange desires, and sometimes she can't. (A Control/Remedy drabble collection of odds, ends, and prompt fills.)
Relationships: Emily Pope & Dylan Faden, Jesse Faden & Emily Pope
Series: Control Short Fics [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1978102
Comments: 7
Kudos: 27





	1. specimen [Jesse, Emily, Ahti]

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from hamyheikki on tumblr: Jesse and Emily watching Ahti, speculating about what he is.

“Now we are going to have a new noise, Eleanor thought, listening to the inside of her head; it is changing.”

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

* * *

Neither of them are prone to poetry. Neither of them say, or think, _he’s in the walls_ , or _the House is smaller than we thought_ , or _where are we?_ although they feel all of these, in fleeting impressions. In fact, they are standing in front of the director’s office. ( _Jesse’s office,_ she mentally tries, but even though she has slept on the couch in there, it doesn’t feel like hers.) Emily holds an EMF reader and mutters numbers and substances as a pleasant background noise; Jesse carries the gun and remembers a song she heard once in Utah. 

The janitor sweeps. 

He’s listening to music, loudly. The tinny waltz dances right out of the chunky headphones.

“What _is_ Ahti?” Jesse muses, remembering the trap in the Foundation, the flickering TV. “Did the FBC catch him?”

“He’s been in the House as long as I have,” Emily says.

“Maybe he’s a —"

Ahti says something. Jesse can’t make out what. Jesse stops, ready to treat him like an employee (or her boss) the second he indicates interest in them. But he hasn’t 

“Can he hear us?” Jesse whispers.

Director and head of research jostle together, arm against arm, close like children. 

“Not unless he has super hearing,” Emily whispers. “I haven’t tested for that.”

“I’m beginning to wonder what you _have_ tested him for.”

“He’s an employee, not an O.O.P. We have a lot of work to do, madame director.” 

Emily’s joking, and Jesse smiles to make sure she knows she hasn’t overstepped a boundary. They’re still figuring out what their work-life boundaries are, and that’s okay. 

“They can hear me?” Ahti says in his uneven voice, and then he laughs loud and long, his mouth hardly open but his dark eyes full of mirth and mischief. 

Jesse and Emily look at one another. Jesse enjoys the moment of being harmlessly unsettled. The House delights as well as horrifies her, sometimes, and she likes to see that wonder reflected back in Emily’s identical expression.

But Emily has been around Ahti longer than Jesse has, and she starts making notes.

It feels wrong, suddenly, studying a person like he’s an animal. It feels like what they did to Dylan.

Jesse takes Emily’s arm. “Hey. Let’s leave him alone for now. He’s just doing his job. Ah, he might even be doing my job.”

“Director?”

Jesse laughs. “No. Although if he wants it …” 

Ahti waves contentedly as they go by, the music still blasting, and Jesse gets the feeling that he has heard every word.


	2. child king [Dylan, Emily]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from one-berzerker: Dylan's arrival at Central Executive

Dylan Faden hadn’t been up here in a long time.

He hadn’t been up here since he was small. 

Now, taller and older and with experience of little beyond the walls of a cell, he was sick of life being coherent. Much better to relax into the noise, to let the sound in until the rest of his senses followed. Except that he had to talk. Had to stand up straight in front of the woman in the Research whites that scared him, his back stiff. 

_Emily Pope_. She had introduced herself. She had babbled, like she was afraid of him. She should be, but he felt the insult inherent in the fear, too. It wouldn’t do to let her know he just wanted to sleep. Real sleep. 

Dylan stood below the statue of the black pyramid, guns pointed at his back. “I’m giving myself up,” he repeated.

Emily Pope clutched her clipboard. “T-thank you for c-coming back. You’ll have to wait for J- the director.” 

“That’s too bad.” Dylan said the first thing that came to mind. “He’s dead.”

Emily struggled to compose herself. “Trench is dead. Jesse is the new director.” 

“The House chose her? The big chair stooped?” Half-remembered, dreamlike puppetry. The shadows of command like a crown of razors. He had known she was _here_ by the piping of Polaris in his brain, but somehow he hadn’t thought she would be _in charge._ She was a prime candidate too, of course, but to walk right in and be crowned … 

Dylan started to let go. He didn’t want to think about the directorship. Part of him wanted to think about Jesse, to tell her … What had he wanted to tell her? _The thunder song distorts you?_ Had that been it? 

Rangers showed themselves at his peripheral vision, creeping in with guns, letting him know they were there. Dylan sighed. Emily seemed stunned, looking to the Rangers for a decision she alone could make. 

It would be so much easier not to do this. Suddenly exhausted, Dylan struggled to grasp both words and identity. “He _has_ to tell her.” 

Has to tell her _Polaris is using you._ Anger stabbed in at himself. Polaris had abandoned him, and he wanted her to care, and he hated her. She hadn’t saved Dylan, so why would she save Jesse? He had to warn Jesse. He had to get revenge on Polaris. The distinction was meaningless. Self-interest and selflessness rolled up into one over-examined motive open on a lab table.

It had gotten him out of his prison. That was what mattered. 

He had to tell her what he could to make sure she didn’t end up on _either_ side of a cage.

_Burn the House down with us, sister._

Emily regained her composure. Her voice was steadier than her gaze. She tapped the pen against the pad in nervous harmony. “I’ll allow you to stay here if you let us test you. You’re the only other person in this building who can resist the Hiss. That can help all of us.” 

“Typical Bureau.” He heard the noise — the Hiss, she called it? — buzz in his own voice. They’d put him back in a cell? He hated the idea but would endure it for the chance to tell Jesse what he knew. To set her free. “Fine.” Even as he said it, he started to drift back into the comfort of the sound. Better that than seeing himself let them escort him back. At least it isn’t Trench, that tyrant, and Casper, the traitor, looking at him. 

Still it was so inviting to leave, to ascend, to escape into the song and the sound, and so he bowed his head and tried against his own conflicted will to stay conscious as the rangers escorted him up the stairs, looking dully at the tables, the radios, the control point with a well of power he could sense dimly. His stomach rumbled. Last time he had been here, he had been a table high. 


	3. abalone [Jesse, Former]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from whatsarasaid: why does Former say "abalone?" (The resounding answer: I don't know!)

Jesse opened the old, scratched refrigerator and found a shell inside.

The fridge hadn’t been anyone’s first priority in the lockdown. She visited the Panopticon in case of trouble, navigating the catwalks and echoing pit feeling like a descent whether she flew up or down. Shadows crowded around her, heavy. The suit she wore kept most of her body warm (and cool at other times, some paranatural thermal favor) while cold prickled at her face and hands, making her skin feel chapped. But after seeing the Former in the Foundation, she had added the fridge to her mental list of personal projects. No good to have a monster of unknown motive and fickle favor crawling around the Oldest House unseen.

The shell had bronze-silver lips and an iridescent mouth between them. It smelled strongly oceanic, fish and brine, but only a tiny scrap of yellow-white meat clung to the turquoise swirls inside the abalone.

Jesse picked it up. The edges were hard and uneven, rocky.

The world turned white.

Jesse cursed. The fridge had already been cleansed! What next?

She stood on a chunk of the astral plane. A tongue of black stone veined with gold stretched out into the white void. Sounds were muffled. No longer cold, her hands now felt faintly numb.

In front of her, below the pyramid, the Former was curled upside down like a dead spider, struggling to stand.

Legs that had once slammed her into the ground twitched up toward the void. The pyramid was silent, indifferent. A leg flinched toward her. The Former’s eye flickered and spun, light flashing across the shining black stone. This close, the body loomed four times her height, and she could not see where it ended or began.

“What do you want?” Instead of the gun, Jesse held the abalone. The Service Weapon was gone, even though that shouldn’t be possible. The Board’s gift, the mark of her office, had been taken away. Or its presence had been rendered somehow irrelevant here, enough so that it a version of it could not appear in the astral plane.

She turned the abalone over in her hands. Maybe _what did the Former want_ with this new audience wasn’t the right question. Jesse could not hold on to interest in what any of the House’s powers wanted for long. She had come to decide what to do with or without them. Asking what either the Board or the Former wanted was unnecessary, even cruel and negligent, to Jesse’s goal of removing the Hiss and freeing her brother for good. Might as well ask Trench, if she was going to bother listening to any of these.

And the Former was dangerous. Jesse knew that first hand. Two pieces of information snapped together that never had before: the Former’s appearance in the Foundation and the fridge having been discovered in a collapsed hotel.

_You’ve made a building fall before. You’ve been in the basement of the Oldest House, pulling a column here, cracking a wall there. Would you bring it down on all of us just as soon as help us? We’re the smallest animals in this ecosystem, and even the mold eats us. What kind of reassurance can a predator possibly give?_

However, she would rather help the Former than the Board, if the House’s tendency toward ritual and metaphor was asking her to choose between them. After what had happened in the Foundation, it seemed the Former wanted to help her, not only to spite the Board but because they were also trapped in the lockdown. The Former wanted to be able to make their own choices, and Jesse was going to change the entire FBC to allow more people to do that.

Ritual. The House ran on ritual.

Jesse stepped forward, intending to carry the abalone to the twitching body.

The ground crumbled beneath her before she could put her foot down for the first step. She pushed off of nothing with rocketing force, her flight wobbly but strong. She was becoming good at levitating, and angled herself between drifting rocks, her power screaming in her ears. Strands of her hair drifted free from her pin.

She landed with a boom on the other side. Kept the momentum up in three long strides toward the flailing body. The Former’s legs flailed around her, like the first time she had fought inside the fridge, but with less intent, less aim. Jesse reached the body, which blurred around her like a House shift.

Her fingers dug into the shell. She cracked it open, revealing the opalescent artwork of natural blues, silvers, pink, bronze, and gold inside. Where it had been dry, the shell was now filled with water, clear and bright. She tipped it down onto the trapped body of the Former.

The world turned white again. Even more muffled than usual, she heard the voice: < Abalone #@$% Vivisect @%@# Building @#$! Relief > and saw a dim and foggy silhouette snake away into the void.

Jesse reappeared in front of the fridge. She rubbed the back of her neck, which was as stiff as if she had been standing still in the containment cell for a long time.

_That was new._

_Vivisect._ The word made her skin crawl, her fingers curling against her own neck at the memory of cracking open the shell. What had all that meant? What _was_ the Former? Had it even really been the astral plane, or a vision of something else? She opened her right hand to find the shell gone. The Service Weapon sat motionless on the plinth next to the open, apparently harmless fridge.

Jesse picked it up. No need to dwell on this. It had been one more strange thing in the life of the director. But she would tell Langston, and Emily, and maybe write it down. Whatever the vision had been, it hadn’t been a farewell.


	4. surveillance [Emily, Jesse]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tykobrian asked: Do you think it's possible for Jesse and Emily to have met before Jesse's arrival at the FBC?

Emily Pope was passing one of the FBC’s surveillance rooms when she hard the voices through the open door.

Someone had made a mistake. The door should be closed. By rights she should nudge the heavy metal right now and let it swing shut, possibly triggering a House Shift false alarm but offering no humans for lengthy and meticulously documented blame. 

Instead, part curiosity and part spite pulled her to the sliver of light across the floor. Inside, the light lay over carpet. No one noticed her. Ranks of backs of heads stared at individual consoles. The larger screen showed a highway-side rest stop convenience store. Gum and candy bars and trail mix and lighters ranked under a stone facade. From this angle, all Emily could see of the outside was a gray sidewalk. It could have been anywhere in the United States. 

A woman in a black hoodie was shopping. Emily could see the lines in her face, a lock of red hair and her square chin 

The woman at the rest stop made alarming eye contact, clearly finding the camera and, though a sixth sense or a generalized distrust turning up her hood and angling away from it. 

Emily’s mix of guilt and triumph — one part catching someone else in the act, one part being caught — flared up again. _Someone made a mistake! Someone made a mistake!_ The chanting accusation could have come from one of the puppeteer’s weird skits, but she knew it lived entirely in her own mind, a reflection of the off-kilter perspective she had felt since she saw the door open. 

Chatter rose as people at the consoles took action — finding the woman’s location based on the SKUs of the candy, maybe. The surveillance itself couldn’t be causing her anxiety and guilt, Emily reassured herself. She had known this was part of the job. The woman could be a cryptid in disguise, a paracriminal, any one of a number of weird dangers. Even as Emily heard a voice rise above the others, a voice saying “relocation,” she was most concerned about the breach in security represented by the door. 

She turned away from it, kept walking. She shouldn’t have seen that. She could perhaps mentally file away the fact that she had, though, in case it shed any light on the increasingly tense and secret fights between Trench and Darling. 

Years later, she would look back on this as her first “meeting” with Jesse Faden.


End file.
